Rageh Omaar is guaranteed a wide readership for his first book. Given his instant name and face recognition as BBC's TV correspondent in Baghdad during the Iraq war, people are bound to be interested in his account of life under siege.

Although his writing style is bland and low-key - as one would expect from the cautious disciplines of the Beeb - readers will find several correctives to the postwar debate in Britain. The government's notorious dossier on weapons of mass destruction, the long arguments at the UN over Saddam Hussein's compliance, and the Hutton inquiry have made the war's legality the top issue in Britain.

For Iraqis, the priorities were different. As one of the few reporters who visited the country regularly before the war (being a non-white Muslim helped him get visas), Omaar reminds us of the huge inroads the west was making into the life of Iraqis long before outright invasion began. Sanctions had had a devastating effect, and a decade of hardship was bound to colour Iraqis' views of the west when it came as a "liberator" last year.

He also provides a useful reminder that the decision to invade was taken months earlier than the UN debates about WMD. He was in Baghdad when Tony Blair and George Bush met at the president's Texas ranch in April 2002. At the press conference afterwards Bush announced that his government's policy was to remove Saddam and "all options are on the table". Asked if British policy was the same, Blair failed to deny it.

In Iraq Saddam organised a parade of military defiance, and Omaar saw civilians hastily pressed into a compulsory rally with rifles lent for the afternoon. There was no hysteria or food hoarding, but most Iraqis already felt resigned to war.

Whether they welcomed the prospect even though it was bound to remove a hated regime is one of the key issues on which the war's justification rests. Omaar, unfortunately, says little on this. His book shows how much he was a prisoner of circumstances. The official "minder" system made it hard for reporters to talk to Iraqis. Indeed, the Iraqis he talked to most were the minders themselves. They were not as loyal to Saddam as they should have been, since no system is hermetic, but they were a barrier to contact. Another barrier was the 24-hour news cycle, the curse that makes it increasingly hard for broadcast journalists to go out and report.

There is an important message for journalists in Karl von Clausewitz's Prussian description of war as "the continuation of politics by other means". A war correspondent is a political reporter in a different context. Of course, war creates its own dynamic. Blood, revenge, fear, and the desperate struggle for survival change the way people behave and think. But ultimately wars are still about politics. "Human interest" reporting is not enough. Who benefits from letting war happen, which groups expect to suffer most and which least while the fighting is under way, who manages to do best from victory or defeat - these are political issues.

Yet in this Iraq war there was a strange void at the heart of the coverage. Before the war started we knew what public opinion in Britain and other western countries thought about its wisdom. Governments made their views known at the United Nations. The complex feelings of the Iraqi people, the main potential victims and beneficiaries, went unreported.

Only the exile community got a little play. It was clear they were highly ambivalent. A straw poll of Iraqis in Jordan, where I spent some weeks before the war, showed a narrow majority against the US-British invasion. Although almost everyone wanted to see Saddam's regime disappear, fear of casualties and chaos, nationalist pride and suspicion of the invaders' motives stopped them supporting war.

Apart from Iraqi Kurds, few exile politicians came out in its favour. Shiite leaders who had spent years in Iran planning and mounting armed opposition to Saddam drew back from endorsing an invasion by foreigners. Adnan Pachachi, one of the secular Sunni moderates who is now a pillar of Iraq's governing council, took quiet pride in his daughter's anti-war activism during the big marches in London.

If Omaar and his Baghdad-based colleagues had made time and space to listen to more Iraqis, they would probably have come across the same heavy doubts about war. This in turn might have prompted the Pentagon and Downing Street planners to think more intelligently about their postwar strategy rather than expecting crowds to throw flowers at the "liberators". Baghdad was not Kosovo.

Oliver Poole certainly saw the ambivalence of Iraqis as the war ended. Working for the Daily Telegraph, he was the only British newspaper reporter to be embedded with US troops. His is a very honest account, devoid of false heroics, and an admirable lesson in how a reporter can share in the solidarity of enduring fear and discomfort with troops to whom he owes his survival, but not lose his critical detachment.

His story of the arrival in Baghdad gives a chilling picture of trigger-happy soldiers who made no effort to spare civilians as they blasted at anything that moved. It was this among many other things that prevented Iraqis coming out to welcome them. One group of Iraqis wanted to thank US troops at a checkpoint for toppling the dictator. Poole wryly advised them that "as long as they had their hands clearly visible above their heads the soldiers would be pleased to hear their gratitude". He heard other Iraqis muttering: "How would you feel if there were foreign tanks outside your home?"

As postwar Iraq struggles forward, Toby Dodge's book has many lessons. Inventing Iraq is primarily a cold-eyed analysis of Britain's failures as an occupying power after the first world war. The title embodies the way British officers and administrators imposed their land-owner prejudices on the complex Iraqi society they found. Rural tribesmen were "naive but honest, upstanding and ready to make the necessarily slow passage to a better, more authentic life under the modern liberal state". It was the secular townspeople who were considered corrupt and venal.

If generals fight the next war as though it was the same as the last one, diplomats and reporters often cover wars by the same template. Much current analysis of Iraq treats ethnic origin or sectarian allegiance as every individual's defining identity, and projects a Balkan descent into civil war. Dodge's book is a powerful warning to look at countries in their own cultural and historical context.

In his view, Iraq's violent political culture is the main problem, and Saddam's rule was more a symptom than a cause. If there is a foreign parallel, Dodge's gloomy long-term prediction is that Iraq will follow Egypt in having "a population demobilised and resentful while the state will dominate society through high levels of organised violence".